La terra chiama is the newly published book by the author Valentina Boschetto Doorly (Arezzo, 1963). The book is available in Italian.
The book explores the migration from cities to the countryside, mountains and isolated villages that is affecting our contemporary. An unstructured movement born as a reaction to the increasingly suffocating metropolitan life and environmental problems.
It involves the “new settlers”, who combine sustainable agriculture with technological innovation by growing vegetables in hydroponic greenhouses, and the “new highlanders” who have found a home in the Alps, over a thousand meters high. From those who, after years of work in the city, have discovered their future in a village to be repopulated, to the “vertical tourists”, who shy away from hit-and-run tourism in postcard destinations and dedicate themselves to slow travel.
Our Maurizio Berti also collaborated with Boschetto Doorly. Specifically, they discussed the depopulation of small villages and the 1 euro houses initiative that seeks to counter this phenomenon.
Boschetto Doorly is a long-time manager in the tourism and hospitality sector. She worked between Italy and Ireland, where she lived for many years. Winner of international marketing awards, she focuses on megatrends and their systemic impact on the evolution of our societies. She writes for various trade magazines and has published with Springer Megatrends Defining the Future of Tourism: A Journey Within the Journey in 12 Universal Truths (2020).
Here’s a small section of the book (the translation is ours):
In two decades, we have seen all our inland villages shrink to empty skeletons as empty were the eyes of the last old men left there to die in the house, with the neighbor climbing up with the ladder leaning out the window, to find the bloodless body of poor Ettore and go to open the door below to allow the gravedigger to enter. These are the stories of thousands of people that nobody tells, nobody wants to tell.
Our foolish civilization has taken away from the earth the right to be looked after and from the people the right to stay. Without even giving any news of them. Yet in Italy the so-called “internal areas” represent 53% of the Italian municipalities. There are more than 4000 with 13 million inhabitants. Against all odds. And then again, inland areas in Italy occupy over 60% of the national surface. Although we tried to end them as a useless and out of fashion accessory, cutting them off even from state TV, we have not been able to weed out all forms of life, and today they are back to the rescue with new arguments, new methods and, surprisingly, with a new one. awareness that shouts: it’s not good, it’s not right, we don’t give up.
Our review:
A fluid reading that starting from the analysis of “What we have become” offers us a model of “How we would like and could be”. A future that has already begun, as evidenced by the stories of the avant-garde who seek their way outside conventional paths. Not a desperate race in search of new territories but the conscious and conscious search for models that respect the Earth and the people who populate it.
